Having the right foster care expert can give you great insight into helping a child have a positive outcome. Motivational speaker Derek Clark uses his past experience in foster care to bring insight and encouragement on how to avoid becoming a victim of the system.

There are currently over 437,000 children in the foster care system with more entering every year. To be honest these are the numbers for 2016, the most recent year we have stats for, so the number is most likely even higher. The number of children entering the system has been out pacing the children exiting the system for years. Most states are struggling to keep up with this increase.

Children are placed in the foster care system for a myriad of reasons from child neglect to child abuse. On average 45% of foster children live in non-relative foster family homes while 32% live in relative foster family homes and 23% live in institutions, group homes, trial or pre-adoptive homes. While the people who work within this system do their best with the resources they have it is hard to deny the reality this existence has on the children. The average student in foster care will move schools at least once or twice a year. These children are said to lose four to six months of academic progress with each move putting them years behind their peers. Of the youth who age out of foster care, half will not graduate from high school and a quarter will be incarcerated within 2 years. These are just some of the overwhelming challenges these children will face during this difficult time.

There are many doctors and professionals who claim to be experts in the field of foster care but they are often missing one very important thing… perspective. They can be extremely well educated and very well intentioned but still only be able to relate to their field from an outside perspective. A true expert should have experience living within the foster care system. Motivational speaker Derek Clark is an inspiring foster care expert who was abandoned at age 5 and grew up in the foster care system for 13 years. He experienced brutal adversity including child abuse, rejection and abandonment. Doctors and researchers may know a lot about foster care from the outside looking in, but foster care expert Derek Clark is sharing a perspective from the inside out. In spite of all that life through at him he is proof that if you care about a child and invest in that child, a positive outcome can take place.

If you want to make your event the best one yet and share this insider’s perspective, book foster care expert and inspiring motivational speaker Derek Clark.